Transpersonal Gratitude, Emotional Intelligence, Life Contentment, and Mental Health Risk among Adolescents and Young Adults

World statistics demonstrate that around 970 million people around the globe suffer from mental health problems (Ritchie & Roser, 2019), a major proportion of which comprised of adolescents and young adults (UNODC, 2018). Also, because of increased mental health issues the problems like substance use, suicide, depression, anxiety, and stress are also increasing (Armstrong, 2019; Bandelow & Michaelis, 2015; Ritchie & Roser, 2018; United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime [UNODC], 2019). It is thus a dire need to address the issue. The present coneptual paper proposed the role of transpersonal gratitude, emotional intelligence, and life contentment for reducing mental health risk among the adolescents and young adults.

Many protective factors could play role to prevent the state of mental risk that might be imposed by the challenges as mentioned above. The most significant of which is biology; stating that some biological factors make an individual prone to mental health issues (Wasserman & Wasserman, 2016;Wlodarczyk et al., 2017). The next come the environmental factors which constitute of both society and situation. These factors are social support (Harandi et al., 2017), financial stability (Brackertz et al., 2020;Shippee et al., 2019), and sense of security (Daneshnejad & Matin, 2016). Psychological factors like resilience (Gloria & Steinhardt, 2016;Rutten et al., 2013), self-reflection (Philippi & Koenigs, 2014), personal growth (Gamme & Eriksson, 2018;Lauveng et al., 2016), self-regulation (Calam & Bee, 2018;Woodward et al., 2017), and optimism (Fatima et al., 2019;Yuan & Wang, 2016). All these factors act in an integrative manner to prevent development of a mental issue.
The present research proposal, however, proposed to study effect of transpersonal gratitude, emotional intelligence, and life contentment on mental health risk. Mental health risk will be assessed in terms of level of depression, anxiety, and stress because these three mental health issues forms the fundamental constituent for a major proportion of prevailing mental health issues (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2013) like major depressive disorder Preprints (www.preprints.org) | NOT PEER-REVIEWED | Posted: 25 July 2020 doi:10.20944/preprints202007.0620.v1 (Belleau et al., 2019;Richter-Levin & Xu, 2018;Xin et al., 2015), mood and anxiety disorders (Lee et al., 2019;Syed & Nameroff, 2017), and substance use disorder (Carey, 2018;McHugh et al., 2020). The assessment for mental health risk in proposed study would be such that higher the degree of depression, anxiety, and stress higher will be the mental health risk. The study variables, which are proposed to protect individual's mental health, are briefly introduced in the following paragraphs.
Personal gratitude is the person's sense of being thankful to the world or specific individuals who have either assisted or provided ease to that person (Mercon-Vargas et al., 2018;Tudge & Freitas, 2018).Transpersonal gratitude, on contrast, referred to the gratitude that extended beyond the personal gratitude (Artinian, 2019;Elfers & Hlava, 2016). It comprised of four major domains; expression of gratitude (i.e., recognition that someone has benefit you by going out of their way motivates to express gratitude towards them), value of gratitude (i.e., expression of gratitude enhances interpersonal relationships), transcendent gratitude (i.e., feeling a benefit outside of oneself such as blessings and opportunities), and spiritual connection (i.e., attribution of benefit as coming from divine which result to experience sense of connection to divine presence) (Hlava, Elfers, & Offringa, 2014).
Literature demonstrates that high degree of transpersonal gratitude could help prevent the depression, anxiety, and stress (Allen, 2018;Becker, 2015;Chowdhury, 2020;Hlafa & Elfers, 2014). Also, it has been found that emotional intelligence; the ability to understand and manage one's emotions and of others around us (Salovey & Mayer, 1990;Schutte et al., 1998), is associated with transpersonal gratitude such that higher the gratitude higher the emotional intelligence (Geng, 2018 emotional and mental state of satisfaction with the life situations a person is experiencing (Lavallee et al., 2007). Life contentment also found in literature to be associated negatively with depression, anxiety, and stress (Ghazwin et al., 2016;Guney et al., 2010;Nes et al., 2013).
It has a positive relationship with transpersonal gratitude which is found to foster life contentment and also act as the precursor of it (Salvador-Ferrer, 2017;Unanue et al., 2019).

Significance
Concluding the above discussion, mental health risk is increasing round the globe  6. Emotional intelligence mediates the relationship of transpersonal gratitude with depression, anxiety, and stress among adolescents and young adults.
7. Life contentment mediates the relationship of transpersonal gratitude with depression, anxiety, and stress among adolescents and young adults.
8. Females have higher degree of depression, anxiety, and stress than males.
9. First and last-born score higher on depression, anxiety, and stress than middle-born.

Proposed Research Instruments
The Transpersonal Gratitude Scale (TGS Cronbach's alpha value of.88 indicates that the overall scale and its subscales possess good internal consistency. Schutte et al. (1998) to measure emotional intelligence. It is a 33-item scale with 5 response options; such that, 1 denotes strongly disagree, 2 denotes disagree,3 denotes neither disagree nor agree,4 denotes agree, and 5 denotes strongly agree. 28, and 33 are reverse coded. The total score for the scale ranges from 33-165. The high score on the scale demonstrate high level of emotional intelligence. The Cronbach's alpha value of .90 indicates that the overall scale and its subscales possess good internal consistency.

Methodology Proposed Research Design
The study will be correlational in nature aiming to understand the relationship between study variables; transpersonal gratitude, emotional intelligence, life contentment, and mental health risk. The whole study will be comprised of two phases. Phase-I will determine the construct validity and psychometric properties of study instruments. Phase-II will study the relationship of study variables. The construct validity of research instruments is essential to ensure the validity of factor structure before heading towards the main study (Haig, 2010;Prudon, 2015).

Proposed Model
The reviewed literature helped to design the model for the proposed study as shown in the following: Figure1. Proposed conceptual model of the study showing relationship of transpersonal gratitude, emotional intelligence, life contentment, and mental health risk

Proposed Sample
The sample for the study will comprise of adolescents and young adults (N=500) with equal proportion of males and females. The inclusion criterion for adolescents is teenager up to 17 years old and for young adult the participants must be of age 18-25 years old.

Proposed Analysis
The descriptive analyses would be carried to determine coefficient of reliability, mean, standard deviation, and skewness of data set. The hypotheses of the study will be tested by using inferential analyses like correlation, regression, mediation, and model testing.